Done and finished. I even managed to figure out the construction for the little flap thingy at the top.

Two other seams needed ripping up to get the zipper in its place – in the normal order of assembling the sweater-thing, the zipper was not the last step. Nice to have it fully functional again.

Halfway through replacing the zipper on one of my favourite zip-up… things. (Not a hoodie, not a sweater, not a shirt. Houdini calls it a “mid-layer” but that feels weirdly technical.)

I was gearing up towards sending it away for letting a pro do it. 500 kr is a juicy price, but it’s a good-quality sweater-thing, so kind of worth it, I guess. Then I saw that the price was 550 and not 500 as I had remembered, and then the shipping cost turned out to be another 150, at which point I said, to heck with that, how hard can it be, and went off searching for a separating zipper of the right length instead.

It’s a little bit tricky, because there’s this extra strip of fabric behind one of the zipper halves. Three seams for the half I’ve done, and two for the other one. Taking me all day, seriously, 550 kr is a good price for this job.

Hand-sewn because I don’t think I could manage it on my basic sewing machine. It clearly looks hand-sewn, and while my eyes have been trained to see machine-stitched seams as the standard and hand-stitched ones as a simpler, cruder alternative, it really isn’t. Nobody thinks of a hand-finished top-stitching seam on a tailored men’s suit as crude. Neither is this.

A bunch of photos of Ingrid’s life in the army. Unfortunately I don’t know the identity of the photographer(s).

Most of these are from Ingrid’s group’s multi-day “beret test” in the field, after which they are officially done with their basic training and are allowed to wear the stylish beret instead of the basic cap (when not in the field).

The last photo is an official one, from when the group had passed the test. It’s not so easy to tell but Ingrid is the one in the middle, right below the flagpole.

A much-delayed graduation celebration for Adrian, on the occasion of him finishing 9th grade with great grades, at Waipo. Adrian and Ingrid shared a set menu, while I ate two kinds of dumplings, and Eric had deep-fried prawns with rice and veg.

Yeah. I didn’t get very far on the knit top before I had to start over.

The stockinette part (which is the part that is just flat, normal knitting) and the lace part were coming out at very different gauges. The lace was a good 20% looser. It looked sloppy, and threw off the sizing entirely. Plus, the stockinette section gradually widens while the lace section gets narrower, so if they don’t have the same gauge, the width of the garment as a whole will change as one takes over from the other.

My new attempt is with 3.5 mm needles for the stockinette part, trying to keep the knitting relaxed, and with 3 mm needles for the lace, knitting as tightly as I reasonably can. Maybe I should have gone down to 2.5 mm for the lace, but I really don’t want to do another swatch and wait for it to dry for two days. The result looks reasonable enough.

At first the ends of the two needles got tangled with each other all the time. Now that there’s more fabric, it’s more stable and I can manage them better. (I’ve had a fair bit of slow stuff to wait for at work, so I’ve made lots of progress.) Twice now I’ve mixed up the needles somehow and done the entire lace part of a row with the larger needles, and then found myself with a loose needle in my hands.

Five years ago, I was transferring Adrian’s scout badges from an outgrown scout shirt to a new one. Already then I said it would be last time I’d do it for him.

Well, the shirt that was new then has been far to small for a long time. Adrian has been wearing scout t-shirts or hoodies instead. For this year’s summer camp, he wants to have a proper shirt again, and all the badges on it.

He’s been hard at work with the seam ripper to get the badges off the old shirt. There was also a small mountain of badges that he’s earned since then. The total is… impressive. At least fifty.

The amount of work that it would take to sew all these on is truly immense. We’ve concluded that textile glue is the only reasonable way forward.

Adrian is home from school, has lots of free time, and is a tiny bit bored. All his friends are away somewhere – some abroad, some at their summer cottages – so he’s only got me for company. On top of that, he needs to earn money for the World Scout Jamboree he wants to attend next summer. I’ve agreed to pay him for grocery shopping, cooking, and other such chores. As a result, I am living a life of luxury. Well-cooked meals just keep appearing, without me having to lift a finger. I don’t even need to plan them. Case in point: roast tomato and paprika soup, topped with caramelized red onion, served with quesadillas.

Got started on my new knitting project.

I’d made up my mind about which pattern I liked, even confirmed that it should work with the yarn I bought, and then I found out that the pattern seller had closed their shop. Bleh.

Well, it doesn’t look all that complicated, and I was already pretty sure that I would need to change things about the shoulder section, so I guess I’ll just reverse engineer the bits that I like and make up the rest as I go along. It’s a top, knit bottom up, with a lace section that gradually gets narrower along the slant of the lace, so I can just get started and then do that until I get to a point where other things need to start happening.

The wildlife here is not particularly wild. The deer seem to feel right at home in the garden.

The plants I bought yesterday are in the ground, filling in a corner between the hedge and the lower stairs. Two Ribes sanguineum to join the lonely one that was there before, a Physocarpus to add some colour behind them, and some simple perennials to fill out the ground. It doesn’t look like much in a photo, because it’s kind of squeezed in between other things, but trust me, it looks way better like this as opposed to the scraggly grass that was there before.

The hedge in its entire length is no longer just a straight hedge but blends into a shrubbery with soft, curved shapes, with the occasional taller plant sticking up. With that, I feel more or less finished with section 1 of the garden. (Here’s a sketch of the garden, with the sections marked out.) Much of the lawn is gone (yay!), especially the parts that were hardest to mow. The space has been filled out in a satisfying way. There is colour and texture and shape. Sometimes some things even flower, and a few things bear fruit. Whichever direction I approach it from – coming along the street from the station, or the other street the supermarket, or the driveway, or the lower stairs, or the front door, or even looking out and down from the bedroom window – I have a beautiful, welcoming, lush view in front of me.

Now I will make a serious new start with section 4. Today I had Eric’s sister (who is a professional gardener) over for lunch and plant talk. Section 4 is important because that’s where the wooden deck faces, but it’s also tricky due to shallow soil. I now have lists of possible bushes and perennials for the most important spots, and I am starting to get a vague vision of what this part of the garden could look like. I’ve got plenty of digging ahead of me.